In the first admission of its kind, Google says its diabetic blindness AI fell short in real-life tests

Google’s AI designed and trained to catch diabetic blindness showed 90 percent accuracy in the lab but sadly didn’t perform as well in real life. At tests in 11 clinics in Thailand over 8 months, the feasibility of the tech was evaluated on willing patients.

Typically it could take up to 10 weeks to confirm diabetic blindness from the time a medical professional took patients of a patient’s eye. The AI should’ve brought up results in 10 minutes, but the team found that the algorithm couldn’t even recognize a few photos since it had been trained only on high resolution images.

Since the images were taken in poor lighting conditions, the AI rejected the images and it also struggled with poor internet connection speeds.